allanhunter.net Blog

It’s snowing energetically outside so the mood is about right.  Snow, after all, changes the way we see things, at least temporarily, and its disruptive capacity lets us know how much we’ve taken for granted about comfort, mobility, and so on.

It’s a good way to help us reassess.

As 2008 fades I’m reminded of all those wishes one sends each year: ‘Hope the New Year is  great one for you!’ and so on.  With Obama in the White House on January 20th we do, in fact, have more than just a vague hope.  We have an expectation.  Peace is much more likely to happen than under Bush, and although it may not happen as fast as we’d like it now feels distinctly possible.  And add to that our longing for greater equality, greater awareness of the poor, respect for other nations, attention to solving the problems of Global Warming, pollution, and corruption.  It can’t all be done right away, but now it feels do-able.

So we’ve moved from a situation of vague hope that things will turn out nicely without much conscious in-put from us, to a place of seeing actual possibility.  That’s the difference between a dream and a call to action.  We made that shift, we moved to a new place as a whole nation, when we voted.  What does it all mean?  It means there’s work to do.  And we’re ready for it. With this attitude 2009 could turn out to be quite a year…..

I’m sure you’ve noticed. There are quite a lot of rather zippy websites out there - with little video clips and embedded features that enable all sorts of flashy options.  All very cute.  But I really can’t recall many of them, with the possible exception of Guardian UK on-line, which is a ‘newspaper’.  It’s updated about a million times a day, probably employs a staff of hundreds, and is truly informative and entertaining.

Somehow not much of that appeals to me for my own websites.  Am I behind the times? Is my belief in plain-speaking and clarity just too nineteenth century? Or do I just wilt at the thought of employing hundreds of staff? (Definitely a possibility).
Or is it a case of me believing, somehow, in the written word (as opposed to the dancing rabbits with rainbow hats singing the word)?  I mean, this blog is visually very plain, and I think I like it that way.

But perhaps I should ask you, my readers, about it?

I’m just back from a quick trip to Canada, where it was certainly much colder and icier than here.  I think the thing that always surprises me about Canada is that before one reaches the delicious architecture of Old Montreal, with its spectacular restaurants, its streets of granite solidity constructed by dour Scots and ebullient Frenchmen - before one reaches that, one has to pass through the most astounding areas of urban sprawl.  The houses themselves are well built, but with all the architectural appeal of the average cardboard container (in some cases, less).  And there are acres of them.

I can’t understand that.  But the second aspect is one I understand even less.  These ‘estates’ of sprawl that one sees from the road are brand new, still being built, and devoid (as far as I can see) of any community space. There are no libraries, town halls, nor even any shops.  There is no public space of the park variety, and almost no trees. In fact there is no ‘there’ in such places.  They seem to be dormitory areas for commuters. How, in these circumstances, can one build any sense of community, one wonders?

Mercifully these places will be filled with Canadians, who are surely amongst the most civilized, reasonable, and caring folks in the world. (There’s a good reason Canada is placed so high on the UN human rights table each year….)

So how did they allow themselves to build places which, since the 1950s, we’ve all known were dreadful for a sense of community?  This sort of housing is very hard on human beings’ sense of connectedness, as we learned the hard way in England after World War II.

But perhaps the trees will grow, the shops will arrive, and the schools will spring up in their own sweet time.  I do hope so. Then it won’t really matter if the houses are bland and boring. Still, it was an opportunity missed.

I know what you’re thinking… the man is writing a blog on Christmas morning so he obviously has no life. If so, I’d urge you to think again.  Christmas morning, before everyone gets into gear for the day, is about the only free moment I’ll get for several days, so here I am, cup of tea at my elbow, tapping away.

Family gatherings are, for me, always fascinating.  So many archetypes are in play, and so many opportunities to assess what they can tell us.  When families get together sometimes the nostalgia of previous Christmases tempts us to want to see our loved ones as they once were, rather than as they presently are. When this happens sometimes people oblige by playing the role of who they used to be, just to give a ‘gift’ to the other person, and keep everyone happy.  If you once had three slices of pie at Christmas dinner, for example, it’s likely the family will remind you of that event and expect you to keep doing it….

And that’s the balance of Christmas:  we must remember the past with love and humor, but we must also be alert to what is new.  The image of Jesus in a manger reminds us of what’s new, but also of what is immemorial, for births have happened in odd circumstances since child-birth first appeared on the evolutionary scene. And then, just when that scene in the stable seems ordinary and human and messy, the three wise men turn up, and a bunch of shepherds.  Not just the wealthy and wise, but the humble and ordinary have noticed what’s going on, as if to say that anyone who was paying attention would have registered this, and this was not just another baby.

So when you see your friends and relatives and loved ones look at them with love for who they have always been, and then appreciate them for who they may be becoming, now, right in front of your eyes, and honor that.

After all, if Dad always carves the turkey then he has a role that is always the same.  Imagine how that would change if the teenage son were to be offered the task, or if other roles were adjusted to allow for the acknowledgment of personal growth and increased competences in other family members…. It doesn’t have to be mom slaving alone in the kitchen living out a stereotype, either, does it? Perhaps it could be more cooperative.
Have a very Merry Christmas time; whatever you believe or don’t believe it’s a great opportunity to grow more love in the world.

When I was back in the land of my birth I went to take a look at a local sight - Brooklands racing circuit.  This has been disused for decades, but it was built in about 1910 and fast became one of the premier motor-racing circuits, with its banked track and central airfield.  Now there is a shopping Mall in the middle of it, a thriving industrial estate, and a small museum.

A few years back I went to this museum and it was staffed by chatty volunteers; some of the exhibits had obviously been freshly wheeled out of disused barns, cobwebs intact, and the whole place had a charming, slightly ramshackle feel.  Now it’s all glossy partitions, beautifully arranged tableaux of objects complete with explanatory texts etched on black perspex. You could take a gaggle of schoolkids around it and not have any of them do any damage to themselves or the exhibits.  The cafeteria is splendid, clean, warm, and welcoming.

So why do I find myself hankering after the scruffy old place of a dozen years ago?  Why do I long for the presence of people like the garrulous volunteer with a flat cap and a pocket full of screwdrivers who cheerfully interrupted his restoration work to tell anyone who’d listen about what he was doing? Why do I miss the amateurishness of it?

Is it that, in making the fine glitzy display we have now something of the charm has gone?

My old friend Gerald used to have antiques in his house, and every single one of them was used every time it was needed.  If the gravy jug from 1745 got chipped when we were washing the dishes, well, that’s what happened and anyway it had happened before.  Is there not, perhaps, an added delight in having history before us in all its tattiness?  Do museum curators assume we actually prefer the tidied-up display of  Tutankhamun’s tomb to the excitement of that first sight of the unrestored item?

Some of us, of course, do prefer the recreations of Paris and Venice at Las Vegas far more than the grittiness of the real thing.

Which leads me to a question: Is my old England, which I loved well but still left behind, conspiring to turn itself into a theme park, after all? And if so, isn’t it simply responding to forces we have around us all the time that wish to manufacture ‘historic’ and ‘classic’ items for us to coo over?

In a world that values collections of pez dispensers, in which Coca Cola is dubbed  ‘classic’ and anything over ten years old is seen as ‘collectible’ I think we have a right to ask such things.

I was off in England for a couple of days, checking up on my mother, who is slowing up a bit now.  That said, she was beginning to wonder if she needed a new car; something sporty, she felt, that would liven up the run to Waitrose (where she likes to get her bread), and she thought a louder exhaust would be fun too, to let pedestrians know she was on her way. Fortunately this was only a passing idea, and at 85 she’s decided that the car she knows and loves - which has done less than 30,000 miles in over a decade - would be the way to go. I was relieved.
England is facing all sorts of financial melt-downs, of course, amny of which are similar to ours (their motor industry is doing the same thing ours is, for example).  Yet with a state run pension system I didn’t see too many signs of panic and despair. Caution, yes.  Retail sales for this year will be down.  The general feeling, though, is that this monetary debacle is not of the citizens’ making, and that the government is there to protect its citizens from the worst effects of capitalism gone rampant. How different that mood is from the stuff we see on our nightly news here in the US, which is gloomy and panic-stricken by turns.

That doesn’t make their system better, nor does it take away the real grief that threatens so many.  It just places it in a different context. I wonder what a government would look like, here in the US, that put its citizens first, not just the interests of the high rolling money manufacturers who have traditionally had so much more of a claim on our rulers’ time.

What would happen if we reversed the paradigm and put people first, and money second? If we insisted on a decent quality of living rather than accumulating wealth…? If we thought about factories that produced products we needed that were not toxic, rather than thinking about profitability?

Pie in the sky?  It doesn’t have to be.
2009 is coming.  Change is on the way.

Rarely good, is it?  In fact it’s often a real downer, which is why I attend to it with care so that I don’t haunt myself with images of savagery.

According to the news we’re in a desperate financial situation.  Driving past my local Mall the other day, where Best Buy and Target lurk, one would never know it. In fact, ‘driving’ was scarcely possible, as the parking lot was filled and the side roods jammed with parked vehicles, whose owners were headed for the equally jammed aisles.  How can I be sure?  There’s nothing else around within walking distance that isn’t a Mall.

So I’m led to believe that the collapse of the Nation’s dealings has a lot to do with the very wealthy who have money to invest (i.e. ‘gamble’) and not very much to do with the rest of us in terms of the money we have in our pockets.  In the long term, though, those gamblers’ losses will hurt us all as businesses fold and so workmen won’t get paid.

For now, though, sales of electronic gadgets seem to be strong around here, and no one’s cutting back.

How do we understand this?

A reliable friend (how lovely to be ale to write that!) was talking with me the other day about various examples of corruption.  The attempt to sell Obama’s former seat in the Illinois legislature came up, as did the detail that Ms Huffington’s book contained several odd references to her habits.  One was that when she was/is in her spa mud-bath treatment she would keep one hand un-mudded so she could check her Blackberry. Similarly while she did yoga she’d have her Blackberry on the mat beside her.

I’m not sure what kind of Yoga Ms. H aspires to, but in the classes I have taken, and when reading Patanjali, one of the main emphases is on doing the movements and watching how one’s mind operates as one does so.  Note the italics. Can one really do that if one is tethered to one’s Blackberry?

Am I alone in finding this to be, perhaps, a symptom of the way we live now?

Not a word one sees that often, but appropriate for right now.  It’s the opposite of Apogee, meaning the furthest away, or largest, and in this case, epigee refers to the odd fact that the moon, which is on an elliptical orbit of the earth, is currently about 20,000 miles closer to us than usual, and therefore seems to be about 15% brighter.  All the details are documented by those who follow the moon’s movements with telescopes.  I’m a bit more subjective, and relate more to the extra 2 inches of tide caused by this, and to the wondrous glow the moon is presently able to shed upon us.

Facts, you see, can be neatly explanatory.  Yet they do not explain the mystery of watching this brave satellite of ours sail across a sky lately cleared of rain-clouds, nor can they link us to the transcendant in the way one glance over the fields will, where this enormous, monstrous, moon tells us we are, as we always knew, rather small.

We are indeed small. Nature is large.  Yet we matter, every single one of us, and we’re part of that larger Nature.  Indeed, because it is part of us and we are part of it we should, by rights, be moved to take better care of this world than we do.  Perhaps more politicians, some of whom are currently squabbling over factory emissions, pollution levels, carbon credits and climate change deals, should take a look at the moon.

But perhaps I’m hopelessly out of touch?

I get quite a few comments about how helpful it can be to think about the world we experience in terms of archetypes.  One man recently wrote to me about Stories We Need to Know and pointed out that it had deep resonance for him in his relationship. His former girlfriend, he explained, was very much an Orphan, one who wanted to be comfortable in her relationship, but she did not want their life together to grow.  She found it threatening when he became interested in exploring ideas outside the mainstream.  They were too ‘weird’ for her, she said (and she was referring to Buddhism) and made her anxious.  Here was a man who, it seems, was on a Pilgrim’s path of exploration of ideas and learning, and she wanted him to be a couch potato; predictable, reliable, and utterly scheduled.

There’s nothing wrong with being reliable, of course.  Perhaps the woman’s insecurities had caused her to be that way, and we can all understand that, I think.  But at a certain point that desire for stability can become a trap.  The Orphan needs stability, and actually does not want to grow very much if it threatens that steady lifestyle.  The Pilgrim has to explore or feel stifled.

Thinking in terms of Archetypes can help us to see situations like this, which are pretty prevalent, and see that neither person is to blame.  They’re simply at different stages.  The question then has to be: can they both move into the same stage of awareness, and grow together?  The Six Archetypes of Love (my other book on this topic) talks more about this, since it’s probably the single biggest problem for anyone in a relationship. Moreover, knowing that different archetypes exist can make us more alert to what others need, and that in turn will help them grow, too.